


low battery

by telekinesiskid



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Drabble, Drug Use, Implied/Referenced Suicide, M/M, POV Second Person, Suicidal Ideation, character study kinda, descriptions of abandoned theme parks, general grossness ???
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-12
Updated: 2017-01-12
Packaged: 2018-09-17 00:48:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,794
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9296927
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/telekinesiskid/pseuds/telekinesiskid
Summary: Kavinsky gets Ronan, he's still unhappy





	

**Author's Note:**

> 2017 will be the year of FINISHING ALL OF THOSE GD UNFINISHED FICS (hopefully)
> 
> this is probably pretty sloppy, and I'm sorry - if I slap the 'drabble' label on it then it's cool if it's not all polished and coherent, right ?
> 
> s/o to [my wife kii](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kiiouex/pseuds/kiiouex) for beta'ing, as always <3

You’ve always liked the idea of abandoned theme parks. There’s loads in America alone you want to see. You want to go to the _Six Flags_ in New Orleans. You want to wade through the residue hurricane waters that drowned the place back in ‘05, now cold and muddied and polluted. You want to step over the ‘gaters and lose shoes to the marshlands by the pancaked carpark. You want to walk into the remains of candy stores and 4D theatres and arcades and see the exact mark where the corrosive, brackish storm water stripped the paint from the wall, stripped the _wall_ from the wall, leaving only the rusted metal bones. You want to kick around the thousands upon thousands of water-damaged toys, make rank little forts out of them. You want to set up shop in a place devastated by disaster, ruined with decay, and call it home. Faded, peeling, forgotten – just like you.

What you got instead was something a bit more practical. A place like Monmouth Manufacturing, if Gansey had discovered Monmouth a few more decades after its abandonment and someone had briefly tried to turn it into a meth lab. Also, unlike Monmouth, the place wasn’t ever a manufacturing plant; it was just a warehouse of sorts. Now it’s the site to one of your mates’ many raves, a regular haunt. You’re pretty sure the place is about seventy percent asbestos dust, but no one seems to care and neither do you.

Sometimes you’re not always the life of the party. You’re not always in the mood to burn couches or play with pyrotechnics or step out for a booze run that involves a cupboard quiet enough to slip into sleep and come out with crates of alcohol. Sometimes you just sit on the couch and stare at nothing, do nothing, until your cig has burnt down to the butt, until you can feel the dawn peek through the broken windows and you realise that you wanted this party to end hours ago. Sometimes you let people blow their own hands and fingers and faces off and—god, you feel like Lord fucking Voldemort with how many cry at you about their missing limbs, as if you were the one who told them to light those damn fireworks in the first place.

Sometimes you find yourself achingly sober in a world that’s simultaneously a slog and moving too fast, and it’s the least sober you’ve ever felt. You want to die, but you can’t even move.

Even with Ro here, beside you, laughing it up with your pack. Drinking Skov under the table, squabbling with Jiang, drunkenly throwing an arm around Proko and dragging him close and telling him how he’s like a dirtier, coked-up, screw-up funhouse mirror image of his younger brother.

Even with Ro, it’s still…

Someone smacks your arm out of nowhere, accuses you of being a downer and pushes uppers into your hand. You chase them with rum.

 

“Hey. Ro. Let’s run away, you and me. Let’s run away to Dismaland and start over together. You can be Princess Di, I’ll be the Grim Reaper in the dodgem.”

He doesn’t answer. You look at him, partially tucked into your side. He’s asleep, or maybe pretending he didn’t hear you. Your eyes move over his shoulder, along his thick forearms where his skin is roughly equal parts unblemished and torn open—from a fair few years ago now, sure, but those scars aren’t going anywhere anytime soon. You run a finger down a particular nasty curve of a gash, left by a particular nasty curve of a claw, and his arm tenses like you’re a breath of cold air.

You still remember when he first acquired them. Screams, screams, screams, and you learnt from a young age how to tune them out when you needed to, but you were already tuned into the sound of Ro’s screams, even before you ever really heard them. You didn’t look the other way this time; this time you stared. You pushed your shades slowly up your face, and stared into the pitch black of night, looking for movement, looking to paint a picture out of shadows and ink.

He didn’t make it easy for you. You saw what looked to be an artful splay of black machetes, which later turned out to be feathers. You saw what looked like hooks and industrial-sized pliers, which later turned out to be claws and beaks. You saw what looked like a boy you didn’t care about, who later turned out to be Ronan Lynch. Ravaged by nightmares, coated in blood and oil, one cry for every fresh slice in his arm.

You don’t think he really meant for himself to die, but you’ve watched people die with far less purpose than that. From Jersey, from Bulgaria, you’ve seen more than a couple of boys drink themselves to death. You’ve seen mates so drunk they down a bottle of vodka and a bottle of cleaner and not know the difference. You’ve seen mates who haven’t cried since they were in diapers drop to their knees and wail loud and alone into the puke-stained carpet. Mates whose mothers have been dead for years, suddenly screaming _“moooomm!”_ mere minutes before they start to convulse and the foam dribbles from their open mouths. Mates who sprawl across your lap and quietly doze off and never wake up.

You run your hand up the back of Ro’s head, feel the bristle and fuzz of it. You don’t want any of that for Ro. If he asked, you’d pop a cap in his head, clean and quick, with no second thoughts about it. You’d do that for him.

A phone buzzes, from somewhere in the lumpy, stringy couch you’re seated at. Ro’s face creases as he rolls over and you push him a bit further so you can reach down the back of the couch and pull out what looks to be Ro’s phone. It’s a miracle it still has a battery life to speak of, considering how many days it’s been missing, considering how many calls it’s probably missed. It’s an outdated, blocky thing and you marvel the fact that you have to press a _button_ to answer the call. “Hey, King.”

Gansey sighs on the other end, tired and dejected. He doesn’t sound _surprised,_ but still no less disappointed to reach you. _“Kavinsky.”_

You throw your arm over the back of the couch and Ro’s head shifts to lean on it. Your thumb runs over the shell of his ear. “You missed our party last night. I’m honestly surprised you didn’t hear it; you’re only a couple miles away.”

_“I must’ve missed the invite,_ ” he replies, and the bite to it makes you grin.

“Well, you’re more than welcome anytime, Gansey-boy. You should know that.”

_“Kavinsky,”_ he pleads quietly and your face sours. “ _Give him back. Please.”_

Your heart stumbles like he kicked it. Your hand digs into the side of Ro’s head, nails biting into scalp, and then your hand moves to rip up chunks of upholstery from the rotted couch.

“I didn’t _take_ Lynch from you, _Dick_ ,” you spit, tossing bits of discoloured sponge to the busted floorboards. “He _chose_ me. When will you get that through your thick fucking crown? Y’know—this is probably why he left you. He had about as much agency under you as a Rottweiler on a leash.”

_“He needs_ help,” Gansey says, and for a second it knocks the breath out of you, because you _are_ helping him. You’re helping him in ways that nobody ever fucking bothered to help you. _“If he stays with you then he’s going to wind up dead.”_

You sneer. Beside your foot you find a capless, flashy bottle of _something,_ and you stop only long enough to determine it’s not piss before you take a drink. Your face grimaces; it just tastes like ash and bitter backwash. “We all die in the end, King.”

He doesn’t sound too satisfied with that. _“I want to talk to you, face to face. Ronan too.”_

“No chance.”

_“I thought I was welcome anytime.”_

“Not anymore you’re not,” you mutter. “And listen—don’t bother calling again if it’s just to keep harping on about how I’m such a fucking monster for giving Ro _exactly_ what he wanted. Why don’t you come up with a few conversation starters next time? Ask me how the weather is, how my grades are. Ask me how my father’s doing.”

The call cuts out. You hold it away from your ear to stare at the screen. For a second you’re genuinely amused that Gansey could commit the height of rudeness and hang up on you, but then you see that the phone had just… died. Just died. No warning beeps, no flash of LOW BATTERY, no nothing.

You toss the phone at Ro’s skull; he jolts, snarls, and rolls away from you. You tap his arm cordially. “Time for a new phone, Ro. I’m a little tired of getting all this shit for you when you’re more than capable of getting it all yourself, so you can do it this time.”

It’s always been a good time when he comes out of sleep like a four-year coma: all cricks and aches and stilted tremors. He leans forward and slowly bows his head between his spread knees like he might upchuck what’s left of last night’s haul in his stomach. He spots his phone on the floor and reaches for it, presses and holds the power button for about twenty seconds before deciding its dead. “Who called?” he asks, his words swilled in a way that forces you to feel a fraction of his nausea.

You rub his back. “Just a trumped-up king, no one important.”

“Fuck,” he mumbles, dropping the phone. He scrubs his face of sleep, winces when he finds the bruises. _“Fuck._ What’d he say?”

You raise one shoulder in a disinterested shrug. “Y’know… Preached his whole ‘Gansey Knows Best’ shtick. Anyway, forget about him, I’m fuckin’ starved—pancakes?”

Ro makes a face – a face that could already pass for a handsome reaper – like the mere mention of food has made his stomach violently revolt. Five seconds of will-he-won’t-he wobbling later and you’re watching him retch sickly onto someone’s kicked-off sliders, inches from someone’s soot-black feet. The hot, putridness of vomit mixes with every other raw stench of the place, and your nose wrinkles. You just need some fresh air, probably.

You shake your head at him, a show of mock sympathy. “I’d hold your hair back for you, princess, but you went and shaved off all your pretty little locks. We’re gonna have to get you a wig.”

**Author's Note:**

> hmu on [tumblr](http://telekinesiskid.tumblr.com/)


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